During the past years, the interest in using mobile and landline/wireline computing devices in day-to-day communications has increased. Desktop computers, workstations, and other wireline computers currently allow users to communicate, for example, via e-mail, video conferencing, and instant messaging (IM). Mobile devices, for example, mobile telephones, smartphones, handheld computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) etc., also allow the users to communicate via e-mail, video conferencing, IM, and the like.
Mobile telephones have conventionally served as voice communication devices, but through technological advancements they have recently proved to be effective devices for communicating data, graphics, documents, etc. Wireless and landline technologies continue to merge into a more unified communication system, as user demand for seamless communications across different platforms increases.
Many communication applications allow for real-time or near real-time communication that falls outside of the traditional voice communication associated with wireline and wireless telephone communications. Chat session, instant messaging, Short Message Service (SMS), video conferencing, are a few such communication vehicles.
Many of these types of communications are expected to become increasingly popular, particularly in view of the proliferation of wireless devices and continual technological breakthroughs in this area.
One method for facilitating the above mentioned communication vehicles relates to the contact subscription service technology that can be used to update contact information automatically. Indeed, the contact subscription service facilitates the update of the contact information in a mobile device. With this service, contact information is updated without user intervention and therefore users may use the other services without having to worry about updating their contacts information.
The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a network system that is based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is suitable to be used as a platform for a broad range of advanced Internet-based multimedia services and applications, such as e.g. the contact subscription service, on top of a packet switched network.
A mechanism of subscription and notification based upon SIP protocol is used in the IMS. This mechanism has been adopted to build eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Document Management (XDM) services in Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).
An XDM enabler specifies how user-specific, service-related information is represented in structured XML documents, as well as the common protocol for accessing and manipulating said documents, e.g. creating, changing, deleting, etc. these XML documents.
Features of the XDM enabler include XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP), by which users can store and manipulate their service-related data, stored in the network as XML documents. Documents accessed and manipulated via XCAP are stored in logical repositories in the network, called XML Document Management Servers (XDMS).
Each XML document stored in an XDMS is described as an Application Usage, which enables applications to use the document via XCAP. The XDM enabler describes Application Usages which can be reused by multiple enablers and are stored in logical entities called Shared XDMSs.
Under the current XDM architecture, a XDM Client (XDMC) shall have both SIP and XCAP capabilities. Hence the identity of a user, i.e. the user's SIP Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), can be used as a XCAP User Identity (XUI) to build a directory hierarchy in which the XML document may be stored. It also allows an XDMS to send SIP SUBSCRIBE and receive SIP NOTIFY on the behalf of the user by using the user's SIP URI.
However, terminal device manufacturers are not willing to put any SIP stack in mobile devices due to implementation cost and complexity. It is foreseen, most devices that will be released on the market will not implement SIP stacks.
In the ongoing OMA Converged Address Book working group, indications have been clear that non-SIP devices should be supported. As a result, a terminal device is not required to support SIP stack. It implies that the corresponding user is not required to have a SIP URI for his/her identification.
Thus, as it can be seen, non-SIP devices may not be able to use SIP protocol and therefore services such as a contact subscription service may not work for these devices. The present invention aims at providing a solution that solves at least some of the aforementioned problems.